CHAPTER 86 – REVISITING THE PAST

Aaron watched the snake-like object move about. It was the most interesting thing he had seen in a long time. It was certainly more interesting than the rolled-up socks and other objects his mother had thrown for him to play with earlier in the week.

He liked the way the cable arched itself, flinging its thick coil body in the air. He reached an arm upward but the object of his interest was too far away as it moved about him.

"Jack, I have to go get him," Elizabeth said urgently.

She made a move forward, but Jack grabbed her arm and held her back.

"It's too dangerous. It's sending out volts like crazy. You'll get hit." His tense fingers dug into Elizabeth's arm as he kept her from moving forward. His heart was pounding but he tried to keep his voice calm as he finally released her.

Jack knew that Aaron was small enough that if he crawled and if he was extremely lucky, he might avoid getting hit by the thick cable itself, but there was no guarantee he wouldn't get shocked by the electricity erratically spewing out of it. In fact, it was highly likely that he would get hit.

"One zap and it will kill the kid," one of the scientists remarked seriously. He didn't intend for Elizabeth and Jack to hear, but other than the noise from the electric cable, his voice was the only sound.

"Shut up," Jack ordered. His words were directed at the scientist, but his eyes never left the cable. He followed it as it arced madly, spitting out its voltage.

"You could do some kind of maneuvers. You know run in there, scoop him up, drop to the ground, and roll out of there," a young crew member who had played rugby in college volunteered as he tried to be helpful. "And try not to get shocked," he added weakly.

"Someone turn off the electricity!" Jack yelled to the crowd and then turned his voice back to his son.

"Aaron. Stay where you are. Just sit there, son."

Aaron ignored his father's voice, and put his hands on the floor in front of him. He lifted up his diapered bottom in the adorable way he liked to crawl.

Keeping his knees off the ground and using his hands and feet in an upside "v" shape, he moved a few inches forward to explore the mess which littered the floor and the cable which was so interesting.

"Aaron!" Elizabeth cried out shrilly, and then forced herself to speak calmly. "I need you to be still. Mommy needs you not to move. Don't move, baby", Elizabeth directed her son.

The boy stopped, whether because of her voice or because he was intrigued by a puddle, didn't matter to Elizabeth and Jack. They watched as their little boy played with the water under one of his palms. He giggled at the little drops that flew up in the air when his hand smacked against the liquid.

"Why is the electricity still turned on?!" Jack screamed over his shoulder.

"We're getting it," a lieutenant from main control hurriedly answered as he ran up to Jack and Elizabeth after having been notified of the problem. He stopped short when he saw the cable swing overhead. Although he was more than a foot away from the cable's possible reach, he instinctively ducked.

"We need to turn off the electricity, but it's the same system for some of the navigation, so we have to divide out the power supplies," he explained. He pushed his curly white hair from his face, and looked in awe at the scene.

The cable arced suddenly in the direction of a small crowd of diners standing to the side. They leapt backwards in fear.

"Damn!" someone exclaimed. "That was close."

"Move back everyone!" a commanding voice instructed.

Parents, deciding the situation was too intense, put their arms on their children and herded them out of the room.

Elizabeth desperately wanted to put her arms around her own child, but it was too dangerous for either of them to move.

"No!" Elizabeth yelled when she saw her son moving forward. He had become bored with the small puddle of water. "No, Acorn! Bad! Don't come here."

She had never yelled at him before. Never reprimanded him in such a way. Never felt her heart breaking like it did now to speak him so cruelly.

Aaron, startled by Elizabeth's harsh command, stopped moving.

He didn't usually understand the many words his mother used – especially when she read aloud from some of the thick books she always seemed to have- but he knew her voice. He knew the soft lilt when she sang to him and rocked him in her arms. He knew the way her voice changed inflection from suspenseful to happy when she told him a story. He knew the excitement in her voice when she showed him something new. He knew the quiet soothing sound of her voice in the dim evening light when he was tired. Those were the sounds he associated with her voice.

This wasn't her voice at all. At least not the one he was used to hearing. His little face crinkled in confusion.

It made him unhappy and he moved towards her for comfort, but one of his little hands slipped and he fell forward. Uninjured, he lay on the ground and decided his next move.

Jack, who had been quickly surveying the scene, noticed that there was one spot which might protect Aaron until the electricity could be turned off.

"He needs to back up and get under the table," he said aloud as his eyes were drawn to the table a few feet behind his son. "It's dry there and should be safe from the sparks. It's no guarantee but he should be protected from the cable."

"Unless the cable comes from an angle," one of the engineers watching the scene remarked pensively.

"Shut up," Jack said tersely.

"Aaron, back up. Go under the table," Elizabeth told her son in a forced sweet voice. She moved her hands in a shooing motion, encouraging him to move backwards to the safer area. "Go. Back up."

Aaron had no idea what she was saying. The words were meaningless at his age, but he missed her. And so, he did what any baby would do, he began moving towards his mother.

"NO!" she yelled when he came towards her. "Please Aaron, don't come to mommy," she pleaded.

"Hide," Jack commanded her.

"What?"

Elizabeth looked at Jack in confusion.

"Hide so he can't see you."

"But he wants me," Elizabeth's voice trailed off when she realized Jack was right. She couldn't let Aaron try to crawl to her. Not with the cable flying through the air and ejecting electricity. When she had yelled at him, the small boy had become confused and had wanted to go to her for reassurance. When she had spoken kindly to him, he had wanted to go to her for affection. When he had become bored, he had wanted to go to her for comfort.

He wanted his mommy.

When Elizabeth didn't move but stood staring at her son, Jack spoke again.

"I can either risk running in and grabbing him, and most likely get a thousands volts of electricity, or he needs to get under the table. You cannot go to him. It's too dangerous."

Elizabeth nodded and moved behind Jack. She was near tears as she hid from her son when he needed her the most.

Aaron, who had already begun crawling towards Elizabeth, glanced up from the floor in her direction but now she was no longer visible to him.

He looked around and hesitated.

The cable swung uncontrollably in front of the boy sending out sparks which landed just a foot from Aaron's face, causing the helpless audience to collectively gasp in horror.

"NO!" Jack yelled forcefully when Aaron finally put his hand forward and then followed it was a leg, mere inches from a puddle.

"Someone TURN OFF THE DAMN ELECTRICITY!" Jack shouted out angrily over his shoulder.

"Aaron, move backwards. Go under the table. The table, son," Jack motioned to the area behind Aaron. "The table. It's behind you. Go. Shoo."

The white-haired lieutenant studied a message on his hand-held computer. "We can't turn it off yet. We're dividing up the electrical units, but we've got the back-up too. It doesn't allow us to turn it off. We have to get the captain to do the override with the generator. It will take a few more minutes."

"How many?"

The man was about to speak when the cable, moved by the force of the electricity pulsating through it, smacked into a wall, and sent a cascade of sparks flying onto the wet floor.

The sizzling sound caused several people to jump in their shoes and cringe.

Aaron sat on his bottom and lifted his arms to be picked up.

"Ten. Twelve maybe," the lieutenant answered Jack's question.

"My son is in a puddle of water with an electric cable arcing wildly around him! We don't have twelve minutes!"

The man shrugged helplessly. "We're doing the best we can. He needs to get under the table away from the cable and sparks."

The small boy tried to understand what had happened but it was too much. He no longer liked being wet. It wasn't fun like when his father took him in the large pool or his mother gave him a bath. He didn't want to splash in the water anymore.

He was getting cold. And everyone was staring at him. He didn't like it.

But what made him the saddest was that neither one of his parents was coming to hold him. He kept his arms raised in a sorrowful plea to be held.

But his father just stared sadly at him and his mother never appeared.

The tiniest Thornton's lips quivered, and quiet tears began to roll down his cheeks.

"Nine minutes," the lieutenant, whom Elizabeth now knew was named Lieutenant Tempus, informed Jack.

"I'm going to try to run and get him, " Jack declared suddenly, but he was stopped by a surge of volts in his direction and the swinging cable.

"Aaron, please don't cry. It's going to be okay," Jack said in an attempt at a soothing voice. He knelt down onto one knee, getting it wet but not caring, so that he was closer to Aaron's eye level.

"We'll cap the wire as soon as the power goes off," a woman reported as she and two other crew members came forward with headlamps and an assortment of tools.

"Eight minutes until the override."

Elizabeth, peeked around Abigail, and watched helplessly. Her friend gave her arm a squeeze. "It's going to be okay," the older woman said in an attempt to be reassuring, but then she cringed and instinctively pulled back her face as sparks flew out and sizzled against a wet table.

Elizabeth closed her eyes against the chaos. "He's going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay," she repeated quietly to herself. "We just have to hold on for another eight minutes."

She wrung her hands together and practically squeezed the skin off of them as the cable came dangerously close to smacking into her son's tiny head.

And then it came to her. A possible solution.

Elizabeth gasped with realization. She grabbed her laptop from under the table and brushed the water from the lid. Quickly, she opened it and began typing.

"Hurry. Hurry," she ordered the machine as she clinked on the keys and the computer began thinking. Its loading icon spinning incessantly as it went through a start-up program.

"What's your password", she yelled to the doctor who was standing close by in case he was needed. A set of defibrillators was in his hands.

"My password?" the man asked in confusion.

"Your password! What's your damn password?!" Elizabeth demanded. "To your computer."

The doctor hesitated for a split second, but the determination in her eyes caused him to not question her any more. He quickly dictated his password letters and numbers.

"Our files are here. It should be in here. It has to be here. Please be here," she muttered as she ran her finger along the screen.

Jack had no idea what Elizabeth was doing and he wondered briefly if she had lost her sanity. He didn't have time to ask. He was too focused on his son and getting the electricity turned off.

"Please, Aaron, move under the –"

The thick wire swung near Jack, and he ducked his head. "Aaron, move back," he said sternly when he recovered. But it was no use. At seven months old, Jack might as well have told the boy to do algebra, or recite the periodic table of elements. The small boy simply had no idea what Jack was trying to convey.

"It will be another seven minutes," Lieutenant Tempus announced as he listened to a voice on his messenger and relayed the information to Jack. "I'm sorry. They're going through the sequence now."

"Seven minutes," Jack groaned in frustration. It would seem like seven hours.

The air crackled as every living creature watched.

The sharp crack of electricity hitting water took Elizabeth by surprise and she involuntarily flinched. Her heart beat faster and she felt her nerves shaking as she tried to concentrate. She mistyped spelling her own last name and had to correct it.

"A. Thornton. Here it is." She clicked on her son's name, and hurriedly moved through the pages of the file on her screen. "Physical. . . .. Anti-pressure suit. . . . Psych test."

"Tell them to go faster!" Jack ordered. He didn't think there was any way he could keep the boy from moving forward for much longer, and it possibly wouldn't matter because the cable was moving so wildly that at any moment it would likely change directions and hit the boy. He had been lucky that he hadn't yet been electrocuted.

"Here it is!" Elizabeth exclaimed to herself again as she found what she was looking for.

She quickly glanced at the table behind Aaron and calculated the distance and direction, then ducked back behind some crew members so Aaron wouldn't see her.

He had caught sight of her just briefly, and the startled boy stopped crying. But only for a second. He hicupped, but when Elizabeth disappeared again, he renewed his tears.

"Thirty feet distance, two feet from the ground, fifty feet from the left wall, seventy feet from the right wall. It's – It's _," Elizabeth mumbled, but she was so nervous, she couldn't do the simple math and her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "Think, stupid. Just do the math!" She chided herself.

Sparks sizzled down to the ground like a firecracker. Someone screamed, and people moved back further and shielded their heads from the spray.

"Damn, that was close. It almost hit the boy," someone exclaimed.

Elizabeth punched in the numbers she needed, elbowed two people out of her way, and moved to the edge of the circle of worried observers. She used one of her hands to keep a young man standing in front of her when he tried to move. "Stand there. I don't want him to see me."

Elizabeth pushed the enter button and waited.

Almost instantaneously, a hologram of smiling Elizabeth appeared under the table across the room. Placed exactly at the coordinates which Elizabeth had entered.

"Come here," Elizabeth's pleasant and calm voice echoed from the gossamer image. "Come here, sweetie."

Aaron's head whipped around. He could see his mother over his shoulder. She was standing under the table behind him.

"The hologram," Jack gasped. "From the psych eval."

"Come to mommy, Acorn," the gossamer Elizabeth encouraged her son.

"What is she doing?" someone whispered.

"She's trying to get him to go under the table," someone else said in realization. "So that he's safe until the electricity is turned off. She's tricking him to going under the table."

"Do you think it will work?" Abigail asked uncertainly.

"It will work," Jack answered.

"He trusts her," Jack said quietly to himself. "He trusts her."

Dear Readers: Thank you to the reviewers! you gave me some ideas for this chapter!